


How Things Are

by letmetellyousomething



Category: Mushishi
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-21
Updated: 2015-12-21
Packaged: 2018-05-08 03:57:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5482454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/letmetellyousomething/pseuds/letmetellyousomething
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Ginko, you wouldn't give me something that you consider dangerous, would you?" She demanded.<br/>"It's not dangerous," he said. She imagined that he adopted a similar tone with his clients.  "But you never know."<br/>Yes, she knew.  She bit on the end of her pipe to suppress a grin, although she trimmed the wick of her anticipation routinely enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How Things Are

**Author's Note:**

  * For [foxinthestars](https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxinthestars/gifts).



Mushi maim, cheat, imitate.

Mushi are entities of the ubiquitous periphery.

Mushi feed, live and die. They fade against the light.

Mushi are closer to a light most can't see.

\---

"Ginko, you wouldn't give me something that you consider dangerous, would you?" She demanded.  
"It's not dangerous," he said. She imagined that he adopted a similar tone with his clients. "But you never know."  
Yes, she knew. She bit on the end of her pipe to suppress a grin, although she trimmed the wick of her anticipation routinely enough.

They were talking about the object that rested between them. They had put their earthenware mugs aside when Ginko had retrieved it. It looked like the head of a dogū, with its oval shape and big saucer eyes. One of those "eyes" was scratched up, while the other one appeared to be blank and open.  
It looked organic and at the same time like something made out of stone, like a fossil.

"I think you should make up your own mind about it." Now, this wasn't something he would have told a client. He was glancing at the sliding door.

Tanyuu needed a moment to understand what Ginko was getting at, of course Tama was sitting behind the sliding door. She coughed discreetly.

Ginko excused himself to use the library.

Tama moved into the room with surprising quickness to pick up the artifact.  
Tanyuu watched her, but the old women didn't deem it necessary to get her agreement.  
She didn't even so much as look at her. Instead she inspected the "eyes" while turning it in her fingers and pressed it to her cheek. Then to her ear.

"It's dead," Tama said with some satisfaction before putting it gently back on the ground. She glanced at her mistress, now almost shyly.

\---

Tanyuu let it be. "That thing" joined her collection of trinkets she had kept in an old cabinet since she had come to this place: insect cocoons, dusty sea shells, limestone pieces she had picked up herself. She had not known the difference between authentic and fake back then. She was a practical person by nature and valued experience. Yet her duty and her foot (and she was careful to keep them apart) had never allowed her to take part in the life she heard from through the mushishi's tales. One which was always being interrupted, jumbled, endangered or arguably enhanced by contact with the mushi.

She kept Ginko's object in a separate drawer in the cabinet.  
She would not have admitted it, but Tama's assessment had put her off its mystery for now. She was busy with her duty as scribe. The koumyaku-suji slowed during wintertime, so many mushishi chose this season to make a visit. 

In hindsight she would think it was maybe for the best, to deflect Tama's curiosity.

Tama, the women that she called grandmother, was a Minai, after all. She had lived a life as mushishi. Her given name meant "whole". They took their meals together when Tanyuu wasn't exhausted by her work.  
It sometimes happened that Tama excused herself in the evening. Hers had been Tanyuu's earliest stories about the mushishi, told in a way that at first seemed to spare her because she was a child, but gained when compared to other mushishi- men who were in the prime of their lives.  
But she never dealt with their visitors in another function than that of the library's keeper. And Tanyuu's keeper. Sometimes she received letters, not messages by uro-san. Other than that she didn't seem to have a private life.  
Since Ginko had confirmed her theory about Kumado getting used and replaced, she couldn't help but look at her differently.

Her grandmother by blood had been a scribe like herself.

By the time of the Yamayaki, the prescribed burn of the highest mountain in their region she had not thought of it again. Tanyuu made the arduous journey to one of "her" mountains to see a snippet of it, a framed slope at an awkward angle that was set ablaze in the far distance. She didn't see the fireworks display. The wind coming from that direction carried the smell of burnt grass long afterwards.

Once the whole plateau had been heavily forested and the people used the bottoms of sinkholes as vegetable fields. The landscape had been transformed more and more by farming, until it had become the rolling hills of pampas grass, littered with jagged karst rocks. More sensitive visitors sometimes remarked how astounding the contrast was when one walked out of the deep forests, or wandered over a small hill, just to be thrown into a vast expanse like this.

For Tanyuu the opposite would have been true. She had lived here for so long that "outside" meant seeing the horizon and the sky at all times, except for the canopy of their walled garden trees.

Maybe it was the promise of spring, but seeing the mountain roast always made her feel restless.

The next day she took the object out of the drawer and examined it again.  
Tanyuu started a series of experiments. She dipped it in water. She buried in it snow and then sheepishly dug deeper to cover it in earth.

Maybe Ginko was testing her. She disliked the idea. It didn't fit him and her good opinion on him. She feared that she might fail it. But although she had little to go by when it came to a trail of test and errors (not many mushishi included them in their stories, except for the necessary failure before the consequent victory) she didn't give up. Her foot made patience necessary. To be a scribe meant to be methodical.

At last she found a solution almost by accident. She huffed  and one eye became opaque like glass, shiny, then transparent.

She could look through it. It smelled old, but different from the metallic, musty age of ink on parchment. More like the cave that surrounded them and undermined the landscape,  or even less grand aspects like an old burrow that could have found besides thick bushels of drying grass. She managed to sit still like this for a while. Her heart was beating heavily, although she didn't feel hectic or exhausted.

You could look through it. She carefully moved the hazy view of the eye through the room. Some of it billowed, although the basic outlines were steady enough. However there was also a scampering and scurrying that her own eyes couldn't focus on. She lowered the eyes quickly. For a moment she had been sure that these were Shimi that had once again unraveled the lines of text, but the room was empty. Tama was tending to things elsewhere. 

She held it closer to the scroll she had been working on. And now the traces on the parchment made sense. They were the voices, or rather, the handwriting of the former scribes, appearing one after another.


End file.
